I am a little confused. When this was first discussed, I was under the impression that we would be deactivating our entire portfolios. I understand the reasons not to close our accounts entirely, but I'm not sure that deleting a percentage of our portfolios will carry the same message.

I am, therefore, on the fence. I have 6600+ images, but am not as willing to sacrifice a percentage as I am to throw in the towel as a mass exodus. The message will likely not be acknowledged by Getty, but will likely ring throughout the industry sending a message of solidarity and intolerance of disrespect for our intellectual property.

My plan is to only leave the worst images I have. All the ones that have made money are going. I want to leave some because they will probably take months to remove my images from Thinkstock and I want to make sure I can withdraw all my earnings. If I'm a few dollars short, I can wait a year for a few sales from my worst images.

If it could be clear cut and I could have all my images removed from Thinkstock and get all my earnings, I'd do it in one go but unfortunately it's not like that.

I know a lot of people will just delete 10% of their worst sellers but that's not going to put me off this time. I've had enough.

If you aren't already, i would suggest passing the message around to all your fellow microstockers and directing them to this thread. All of the friends in your istock creative network would be a good start i think.

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Poncke

« Reply #52 on: January 14, 2013, 14:58 »

0

Count me in, the number is insignificant but still.

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sc

« Reply #53 on: January 14, 2013, 15:20 »

+1

I'll take down at least 1000 that day

Feb 2nd projected total 7034

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Imgorthand

« Reply #54 on: January 14, 2013, 15:25 »

+2

YESS! Great to see some coordinated action by contributors. Come on people! Let's show who's content is of value here!I'm going to deactivate files with you on 2nd Feb, let all your friends know!

Sort of like hostage negotiation. If you kill off all your hostages at once, there's no reason for anyone to negotiate with you. Kill off a significant portion - enough to let them know you're serious, then wait to see if they negotiate. If not, kill some more.

Eventually, they will blink, or else huge portions of their content, and yes, entire portfolios, are gone. Those of us who want out of this have to be prepared to delete our entire ports, absolutely. How that is accomplished is up for debate.

The problem I have is that I mentally can't come up with a realistic response they could give that would make me feel optimistic things would change. iStock is not the same anymore since none of the managing people are involved in the creative field anymore. It used to be photographers, writers, illustrators who ran this company. What do you expect to come out of managers? Even any kind of appeasement can not be trusted in my opinion because next year a different sales person in a different department will come up with a different deal that isn't any better.

Looks like we can easily get up to 10.000 images deleted on 2. feb.That is a message!

Sorry but 10.000 will not be a message. It will be 0.1% of the total library. And it will be 1 day worth of uploading.

Not that I have much hope anyways that things will change. But I think to make a point the minimum you'd need is a 100k.

Even if the number of images deactivated does become large enough to be considered 'a message' __ who is it a message to? Istock? They didn't know anything about this deal and it took them several days to find out on our behalf.

This is a Getty deal and I think it is pretty obvious that Istock management doesn't pull much weight in Seattle. Klein himself has always been sneeringly dismissive of the 'amateurs' at Istock although in reality he probably hates us for taking away so much of his market for high-priced images.

I do think that Istock management sounded genuinely alarmed, shared our concerns (in as much as they could admit to) and did their best to find out the details for us. The views being expressed on the IS forum will have left them in no doubt about the strength of our feelings on this issue __ but I suspect that they are completely powerless to act even if they were sympathetic to our concern. If people are downloading images for free off Google rather than buying them from places like Istock then Istock aren't going to need as many employees, so they do have their own interests at heart.

That's what I don't understand about the Getty/Google Drive 'deal'. As I said before, if the deal is bad for us then, being as Getty keeps 80% of the sale price, it must be just as bad or worse for them. With the information we have now it doesn't make sense unless Getty derives some huge benefit in terms of advertising or data. Of course Google's data is it's main asset so maybe they are sharing some of it with Getty?

We've got a couple of weeks before D-Day and maybe we need to reconsider not only what message to send but who to send it to? Obviously deactivating images/portfolios to prevent them being distributed for free is one thing __ but it's probably not going to be a 'message' that anyone with real authority is going to hear.

lisafx

« Reply #63 on: January 14, 2013, 16:14 »

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As a suggestion for deactivation, there are a lot of calls to deactivate best sellers, and that's a great suggestion.

I think it would also be a good idea to delete our niche images first. Most of our best sellers have probably been copied to death, but if there is a niche that your images serve and very few others, the collection could really be hurt by having those removed.

...That's what I don't understand about the Getty/Google Drive 'deal'. As I said before, if the deal is bad for us then, being as Getty keeps 80% of the sale price, it must be just as bad or worse for them. With the information we have now it doesn't make sense unless Getty derives some huge benefit in terms of advertising or data. Of course Google's data is it's main asset so maybe they are sharing some of it with Getty?

I think this is a move to corner a market, not about the money made on a particular deal. As such they want to be in the driver's seat of the next big shift in how images are sold and I think they think that doing deals with Google is the way forward. If I thought they'd share a reasonable amount of what's made with those who created the images, I wouldn't mind so much.

I think that Google should somehow be a target of D-Day - here are images you'll never get for free giveaway in Google Drive. Or perhaps just kicking up a stink - but they're used to that. They had all the publishing houses them after they began scanning books and they've had the European Union breathing down their necks about anti-competitive behavior.

Finding ways to get those who are concerned that they only use legitimately licensed images (some of those early blog replies on Google's blog asked about that) seems to me to be the important step that we can accomplish. If users were worried about it not being safe to use Google Drive images commercially, it would effectively remove their commercial value to Google and thus in the end Getty. So if users don't like this then Getty and Google don't have more future deals.

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lisafx

If users were worried about it not being safe to use Google Drive images commercially, it would effectively remove their commercial value to Google and thus in the end Getty. So if users don't like this then Getty and Google don't have more future deals.

Yes, yes, yes! This is exactly what needs to be done. Many of us were able to significantly affect buyers leaving Istock when the RC credit scheme was spawned. Now those of us who can need to get the word out to everyone we know in the design community about the legal dangers of using this free content.

Has anyone thought of setting up a tumblr site to catalog some of the best deactivated files? That would give everyone a decent visual representation of what's going on, and could be really powerful.

I like this idea a lot. I wouldn't want to run afoul of copyright/IP considerations though so I had a look at tumbler's about and FAQ. Here's the policy which includes the following:

"You also agree that you will respect the intellectual property rights of others, and represent that you have all of the necessary rights to grant us this license for all Subscriber Content you submit to the Services."

If one person opened an account and posted other people's images with their permission (would need a watermark?) would we be OK?

And should we also make one for all the images in the Google Drive deal where the copyright owner isn't happy about them being their - sort of a "use this at your peril" gallery?

you're not only affecting yourselves by 'notifying' the design community, you're affecting all of us. sure, go out into the world and libel a company in a rant.

an organized community-driven, well-led business plan is one thing.....the way some of you are approaching this is absurd. that you will simply run out into the street and shout out your anger so haphazardly is as much a red flag to me as Getty's greed and lack of concern for contributors.

you're not only affecting yourselves by 'notifying' the design community, you're affecting all of us. sure, go out into the world and libel a company in a rant.

an organized community-driven, well-led business plan is one thing.....the way some of you are approaching this is absurd. that you will simply run out into the street and shout out your anger so haphazardly is as much a red flag to me as Getty's greed and lack of concern for contributors.

If it is so absurd as you think why iStock forum thread entiltled "Google Stealing Images or Another Deal" followed by another thread entitled "Google Drive + update" totalling 54 pages of angry members, have not been deleted and still going strong without any intervention from iStock to stop it?